How to Remember More from What You Read
And ignore the seduction of the literary orgasm
I arrived home in a good mood, excited to tell my girlfriend what I’d accomplished.
“I finished Guns, Germs and Steel!” I selfishly burst out before asking how her day had been.
My girlfriend looked up from watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race, creased her eyes as if thinking hard, and began her journey to blowing my reality to pieces.
“What’s that one about again?” she asked.
“Well it’s essentially about the history of humankind leading up to how we got to where we are now.” I responded, satisfied with my answer.
“That seems like a lot… How does it do that?”
I felt my fingers tighten up. How does it do that…
“Well, for example, he talks about how most languages are found in Papa New Guinue.” I continued.
“Right, but what does that have to do with the history of mankind?”
My girlfriend worked at Indigo. I should have expected this.
The feeling of triumph I had experienced upon finishing the book quickly dwindled down to the realization that I remembered almost nothing from the book I had just read.
Too focused on the literary orgasm
I didn’t start reading on my accord until after University. After drowning myself in self-improvement podcasts detailing the blueprints of successful people, not reading seemed out of the question.
To me, reading represented the collection of knowledge. The more books I could finish, the more knowledge I figured I could collect.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” — George R.R. Martin
The problem with this approach to reading is that it leads to an overemphasis on completion.
Outliers this week, Sapiens next week, 1984 the week after that. I realized that I was taking more pride in running my eyes over the last page of a book and shutting it in completion than I was reflecting on and applying what I’d learned.
Chris Langan, the man with an IQ of 195 (30% higher than Einstein’s) and a centre-piece subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, touches on this point perfectly:
“To have a high IQ, you tend to specialize, think deep thoughts. You avoid trivia.” — Chris Langan
I was not specializing and I was not thinking deep thoughts. I approached reading like someone preparing for a trivia night — trying to remember cold stats and out-of-context quotes.
A change was in order.
Remembering what we read
First thing’s first — not everyone reads for the sole purpose of learning.
Some people read simply because they enjoy reading.
I wish I was one of those people, and maybe I will be one day, but most of the books I read I read because I think I can learn something from them. Memory, then, serves a larger role in the enjoyment I get from reading than someone who reads because they love reading.
What the data tells us
There is little conclusive data regarding how much we retain from what we read.
People often like to quote Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience, which states that people remember:
- 10 percent of what they READ
- 20 percent of what they HEAR
- 30 percent of what they SEE
- 50 percent of what they SEE and HEAR
- 70 percent of what they SAY and WRITE
- 90 percent of what they DO
10 percent certainly sounds about right for me, if not less, but unfortunately Dale’s recommendations were proved to be lacking in any actual data.
Existing studies instead show that memory retention varies WILDLY from person to person. When I say WILDLY, we’re talkin’ a range of 0% retention to 94% retention, depending on the person.
So scrap what we remember and how we remember it. Let’s focus on something that does apply to most people — forgetfulness over time.
In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus developed a theory for forgetting called The Forgetting Curve. Unlike Edgar Dale and his Cone of Experience, Ebbinghaus conducted a study to prove his theory.
Ebbinghaus created random three-letter syllables like “WID” and “ZOF” (which also happen to sound like lyrics from a Future song), and tested to see how well he remembered the random syllables at different periods of time.
He then plotted the results in a chart, approximately forming the chart below.
His findings? The longer we wait after learning something to try and retrieve it, the worst we are at retrieving it.
Of course there are other factors to consider like difficulty of the material being learned and physiological factors like tiredness and stress, but from his data Ebbinghaus claimed that while retention may vary drastically from person to person, the rate at which we all forget things is actually pretty similar.
(If century-old data gives you skeptical hippo eyes, you’ll be pleased to know that Ebbinghaus’s original 1885 study was replicated in 2015 and found to show similar results to those found in the original study.)
How then do we not forget?
Back to remembering what we read.
If you think of the books you read as one huge bloc of text, you’re more likely to remember things that are closer to the beginning and end of the bloc than you are things in the middle.
This is called the serial position effect and it looks like this:
If you think of this in the context of an entire book, that’s a lot to potentially miss out on!
If I read a 400 page book about the Nazis’ reliance on amphetamines (please read Blitzed by Norman Ohler if you haven’t already), I want to be able to recall as much as humanly possible, not just Hitler failing art class and the Nero Decree.
Instead of thinking of the beginning and end as the first and last chapter of your book, break your book down into more digestible segments and write down what you remember after each segment.
A segment could be every 30 pages, every chapter, or any length of the book you feel confident reading with minimal memory loss.
Putting this into practice
For example, I just finished reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos (if you’re wondering, bucko, my room is now immaculate). I knew going into it that to try to remember everything from each chapter, or “step”, would be almost useless.
Instead, I took 10 minutes after every chapter (two if they were short) to write down everything I could remember from what I’d just read. After writing everything down, I would quickly skim through the pages again to check to see how accurate I was in my recollection and correct anything that was wrong.
I also tried to write down these reflections as close to finishing the chapter as possible. Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve is an asshole– the longer I waited to write down what I remembered, the less I had to write down.
After finishing the book, I nailed down my takeaway ever more by reviewing all 12 pages of the bullet-point notes that resulted from the book.
Why it worked
I split an otherwise huge bloc of information-heavy text into many smaller blocs, creating many beginnings and ends in the process. Again, we remember a lot more from beginnings and ends than we do from middles.
I put my middle finger to Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve and wrote down everything I remembered immediately after finishing each chapter. I knew that the longer I waited, the more I risked forgetting.
By writing down what I remembered from each chapter, I also increased the number of times I was actively recalling the information. From his study, Ebbinghaus found that the more times we force ourselves to recall something, the less likely we are to forget it farther into the future. Checking for accuracy after every note-taking session stemmed from this same reasoning.
I knew I was bound to forget even the things I wrote down after every chapter, so after finishing the book, I reviewed all the notes I had taken from all chapters. This meant that I had now forced myself to remember information from the book a total number of four times — initial reading, writing down what I remembered after every chapter, checking to if the notes I had taken were accurate, and a final review of all my notes from all the chapters.
If I really wanted to remember something, I might even dabble in overlearning.
Don’t take my word for it
I originally heard a variation of this reading method years ago from respected author and strength coach, Charles Poliquin. For those interested, he briefly speaks about it in this podcast around the the 2:20:00 mark.
I’ve since heard it reiterated by such figures as Professor Jordan Peterson, lifestyle author and entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss, and retired Navy Seal, Jocko Willink.
Here’s a quick TL;DR to take with you:
- Set a number of pages you will read before stopping to take notes (every 30 pages, every chapter, etc.)
- After reading said number of pages, write down EVERYTHING you remember
- Try to write down what you remember as soon as possible after you finish reading to avoid the effects of Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve
- Quickly skim through the pages after taking your notes and correct anything you remembered wrong
- After finishing the book, review all the notes you’ve taken to further solidify you’re takeaway from the book
For people like me who want to squeeze every last nugget of wisdom and practical know-how out of the books they read, this method is a great way to start.
